Brandywine Entrepreneurship Club Hosts First Student Pitch Competition

Penn State Brandywine’s Entrepreneurship Club hosted a student pitch competition, its first major event as a student organization, on March 28. The competition featured six students in the club pitching their startup ideas to a panel of judges.

The Entrepreneurship Club is a new student organization on campus, just launching in the spring 2024 semester. The mission of the club is to develop the entrepreneurial mindset necessary to create a startup business, and all club meetings typically focus on design thinking exercises, business and product development, and prototyping.

The student pitch competition was sponsored by the Brandywine LaunchBox, a signature program of Invent Penn State, a commonwealth-wide initiative to spur economic development, job creation and student career success. The event was created to prepare students for the Idea TestLab Pitch Competition, which will take place in fall 2024.

The winner of the student pitch competition was Pranav Ramesh for his startup CTFGuide, a company that aims to help people learn about cybersecurity easily. Second place was awarded to Tejas Chigurupati for his company Panic Lock LLC, a business with the goal of making school lockdown devices accessible for people with disabilities. Third place was awarded to Francis Bockarie for his startup company MenteeMe, a mobile phone application for colleges to use to put students and alumni in mentor-mentee pairs.

Chigurupati, president of the Entrepreneurship Club and Brandywine LaunchBox digital marketing intern, noted his main goal for the event was to get students’ ideas heard.

“With this event, I wanted to provide students with a place where they feel free to express their creative ideas,” Chigurupati said. “Not only that, but I wanted to make sure their ideas were able to be heard by Brandywine faculty, staff, administrators and fellow students.”

Tony Mattei, staff adviser of the Entrepreneurship Club and Brandywine’s director of entrepreneurship and digital marketing, expressed how impressed he was by the progress students made over the past two months, as well as how proud he was of the students who put the event together.

“As the adviser of the Entrepreneurship Club, I was overwhelmingly proud of the club for organizing and running the first-ever Brandywine student pitch competition. Beginning with our first club meeting at the start of the spring semester, the progress the students made on developing their pitches was remarkable,” Mattei said.

“We had students with ideas that were further developed, pitching alongside students who just started their business ideas two months ago. The six students impressed both the judges and attendees, and I see great futures for all of them.”

Judges for the pitch competition were Patton Vo, director of campus development at Penn State Brandywine; Leo Daiuto, director of the Great Valley LaunchBox; and Luna Yang, assistant professor of business at Penn State Brandywine. Meaghan Daly, president of the Brandywine Alumni Society and small-business owner, assisted in coaching the students as they were preparing their pitches for the event.